Persona 01
Alex, the student.
Builds worlds in his favourite games after school and has started vlogging his own takes on them. Wants to make a player map of his own, and somewhere to get good enough to do it.
age 14
learning
Parent-backed
Creatify
Nine gamer interviews turned a stalled matchmaking app into Creatify, an investor-funded learning platform now teaching game creation in DC-area K-12 school districts.
Gaming
·
Mobile & web · Brand
·
Research, MVP Development
At a glance
Four directions. Nine gamers. One product.
W1
W2
W3
W4
W5
W6
W7
W8
W9
W10
W11
W12
W9
01
Weeks 1 — 2
Frame
Turn a loose brief about gaming and wellbeing into a question that could actually be tested: how gamers build connection, and where a product could earn a place in it.
02
Weeks 3 — 4
Research
Nine 1:1 gamer interviews at 60 minutes each, benchmarked against nine competing platforms, creator-payment models, and app-store performance data.
03
Weeks 5 — 7
Decide
Four product directions written and tested as concepts, from a cosplay marketplace to a modding hub, narrowed to one: a community where gamers learn to create.
04
Week 8
Launch the pivot
A new company name and brand, an investor pitch deck, proof-of-concept mockups, a landing page, and a roadmap running from prelaunch to growth.
05
Week 9
Support
Post-launch iteration
Drag / scroll →
METHOD
9 interviews
1:1, 60 minutes each
LANDSCAPE
9 platforms
Benchmarked feature by feature
GUIDANCE
11 principles
Product recommendations from the study
TEAM
3 people
One strategist, one researcher, one designer
The Client
A gaming app still looking for the product It should have been.
GAMING · Research, MVP Development
Scedugame, Inc. launched as a social networking app for video game players, matching and connecting people by the games they played, their skill level, their interests, and their gaming habits. Its founder, Liam Thurman, had crowdfunded the idea out of Washington, D.C., raising $2,290 from 35 backers on Kickstarter in early 2021.
What the product had not found was the behaviour underneath it. By 2023 Thurman was ready to pivot, and he arrived at Wandr with an interest in mental health and wellness in gaming and an open question rather than a specification: what would actually help gamers build deep, meaningful connections? He was explicit that he wanted research to answer it, even if the answer took him somewhere he had not planned to go.
35 backers
Kickstarter, February 2021
$2,290
Against a $2,000 goal
1 founder
Liam Thurman, Founder and President
The Challenge
The brief was a question,
Not a Product.
A founder with a live app and a funded launch behind him had a product the market would not take, no evidence for what to build instead, and a community that is famously hard to reach for research.
Problem 01
A premise the market had already rejected.
Matching gamers by game, skill level, and habits did not resonate with gaming communities, and the app never gained traction. The problem was not the execution. It was the idea underneath it.
Problem 02
A theme, not a brief.
The engagement opened on gaming and mental wellness, which is a subject rather than a product. Before anything could be designed, the real question had to be found and made narrow enough to test.
Problem 03
A community that does not answer surveys.
Gamers are difficult to recruit for research and quick to dismiss outsiders who do not speak the language. Nine hours of 1:1 interviews had to be earned before a single insight existed.
Problem 04
A five-week clock, with investors watching.
The initial engagement ran five weeks end to end, covering framing, research, concept development, and a recommended direction. Whatever came out of it had to be strong enough to put in front of investors.
Before / After
Same founder,
a different Product.
Drag the handle to see the pivot, from a matchmaking app that paired gamers by skill level into Creatify, a platform that teaches them to build inside the games they already love.
Before
After WANDR
Our Role
From an open question to a named product.
01
Discovery workshops run at startup pace, to open up alternative directions early
02
Nine 1:1 gamer interviews at 60 minutes each, plus a creator and coach research track
03
Competitive benchmarking across nine platforms, creator-payment models, and app-store performance data
04
Four user personas and four end-to-end customer journey maps in high fidelity
05
Four product concepts, tested with gamers and narrowed to one recommendation
06
A new company name and full brand identity, including logo design
07
An investor pitch deck built around the pivot
08
A product roadmap covering prelaunch, private alpha, MVP, and growth
Research
We asked nine gamers what connection Actually Means.
To replace a theme with a product, Wandr ran nine 1:1 interviews of 60 minutes each with gamers, against three goals: understand their online habits, understand how they form connections, and validate a product vision. The sample skewed 25 to 34 (56% of participants) and male (89%), and a third played 15 or more hours a week.
A second discussion guide probed the teaching side of the concept with creators and coaches, and the whole study was read against nine benchmarked platforms, creator-payment models, and app-store performance data. Ten takeaways came out of it. Three reset the brief.
01
fragmentation
Five platforms to answer one question.
Gamers went to Discord to connect, Reddit for information, IGN for developer news, OP.GG for rankings, and YouTube or Twitch for tutorials. No single place held what they needed, and the search cost was highest exactly when the question was most specific. The gap was not another social network. It was somewhere to actually learn.
02
credibility
Every participant wanted pro players in the room.
All nine said the presence of pro players would make a platform more credible and make them more likely to use it. Willingness to pay followed the same line: time with someone better than you was the one thing consistently worth money, and one participant was already buying it elsewhere.
03
HOW THEY LEARN
Three ways to learn, and only one of them is social.
Gamers learn by doing, by searching and commenting, and by watching pro players and tutorials. Silent observers turned out to be a real user type, reading everything and posting nothing. A platform that only rewarded posting would have lost most of the audience it was built for.
Four creators, four different asks.
Persona 02
Jake, the enthusiast.
Has been gaming since he was four and has modded his favourite games with moderate success. Skilled, self-taught, and still waiting for anyone to notice.
age 19
Self-taught
wants recognition
Persona 03
Emily, the creator turned teacher.
A streamer with a real following who wants to do more than play games online. Looking for a way to teach what she knows, schedule it, and be paid properly for it.
age 28
monetizing
Coaches 1:1
Persona 03
The indie studio
An independent game development studio that wants community challenges to surface talent, sharpen its titles, and put playtesting and UX help within reach.
studio
challenges
Playtesting
Stop selling connection.
Sell what they were already doing.
Principle 01Trust
01
Follow the specialisation.
Gamers sort themselves into communities inside communities, so the product had to let people filter by game, role, and skill tier rather than drop them into a general lobby where nobody is at their level.
Principle 02Segment
02
Serve the people who never post.
Silent observers turned out to be a genuine user type, reading everything and contributing nothing, sometimes because they are introverted and sometimes to avoid the negativity. The concept had to be worth using for someone who never speaks.
Principle 03Bingo
03
Make creation the reason to be there.
Connection was a by-product of learning, not a product in its own right. Wandr recommended a community built around making things: courses from industry creators, community challenges, and paid mentorship, with connection as the outcome rather than the pitch.
Principle 01 of 03→ Continue scrolling
THE KEY INSIGHT
Gamers do not want more friends. They want to get better.
Every attempt to build connection directly ran into the same wall. Gamers already have their people, and they guard the circle. What they opened up for was skill: pro players for tactics, creators for tricks, mentors, and the communities that made them better at the thing they love. Connection was never the product. It was what happened on the way to getting good, and that reframe turned a matchmaking app into an education company.
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Outcomes
What the pivot unlocked.
The repositioning did what it was built to do. It gave the company a story investors backed, a product schools would pilot, and a name it still trades under.
01 · Funding
Funded
Additional investor funding secured on the strength of the repositioning and the deck
02 · Partnerships
K-12
School districts in the DC area pilot programs teaching students game creation
03 · Direction
4 → 1
Product concepts narrowed to one tested with gamers, not chosen in a room
04 · Identity
1 brand
Name, logo, system, and guidelines Creatify, still the company's name today
Funding and partnership outcomes are client-reported. No engagement-level performance metric, such as revenue or enrolment, was captured. Research figures are drawn from Wandr's nine-participant study and competitive benchmark.
Client Voice
In their words.
“
Working with Wandr was a pivotal moment for our company. They helped us uncover an entirely new opportunity in the gaming industry and guided us through a strategic pivot with incredible insight and creativity. Their expertise in research, branding, and product design transformed our vision into a compelling platform that secured investor interest and opened doors to meaningful partnerships. We couldn't have done it without them.
Liam Thurman
Founder and President, Creatify
